14 DAY TRIAL // When our ancestors learned how to domesticate animals, society took a giant leap forward. Having the ability to get rid of carrying burdens, and transferring the load on animals meant that our forefathers had more energy, free hands, and so on. Their ability to survive and move faster from one place to the other also improved considerably, facilitating commerce, trade and, ultimately, contact between distant communities. Archaeologists and paleontologists have for a long time tried to identify the earliest domesticated horses, but the goal proved elusive.
One of the main reasons why this happened is the fact that, in the case of wild horses that were first domesticated, evolution and adaptation did not kick in immediately. For many years, the animals exhibited no changes in their skeletons and fossil records, and so finding the first that were tamed was an incredibly difficult task, fraught with the risk of making mistakes. Experts funded by the US National Science Foundation (NSF), and led by Carnegie Museum of Natural History scientist Sandra Olsen, were well aware of that when they began a new investigation into the origins of domestication.
They began looking for clues in Kazakhstan, which is widely regarded as the first place in which horses became aids to humans. The researchers investigated three locations in the northern parts of the country, dating back to 3,500 BC, in the Copper Age. All the sites were known to have belonged to the extinct Botai culture. These areas were home to the tarpan, a small wild horse that flourished in the Eurasian steppes around 11,700 years ago, after it was extinguished from most other regions of the world. They disappeared completely at the beginning of the 20th century, fossil records show.
“Upon examining the sites, we found evidence that could point to the early phases of horse domestication and help explain its initial impacts on society. We found that early domesticated horses were eaten, milked and ridden,” Olsen reveals in a posting on LiveScience. At the studied locations, “stone-tool butchering marks on the bones indicated a community whose diet consisted primarily of horse meat. In addition, there was evidence that horses were sacrificed for religious purposes. We have compelling evidence that the Botai were indeed horse herders, since milking wild mares would be incredibly difficult,” she adds.
“Moreover, no other animal has had such a tremendous impact on geopolitics, chiefly through the successes of imperial cavalries, and no other beast has had so many occupations. Horse domestication certainly has changed the course of human culture as we know it,” Olsen concludes.